This invention relates to the cooling of rack mounted electronic modules and, more particularly, to apparatus which is capable of providing efficient cold plate cooling while accommodating relatively large tolerances in the mounting of the electronic modules.
In a high temperature thermal environment, convection cooling of rack mounted electronic modules may not provide sufficient cooling capacity. Liquid cooling through the use of a cold plate is one approach for providing the required cooling capacity. In this approach, the lower surface of each module must be maintained in heat transferring contact with the cold plate. However, with rack mounted electronic modules, there is a tolerance issue wherein the position of the lower surface of a module cannot be predicted with any certainty, due to the electronic module being positioned by a rack connector and the cold plate being fixed on the rack. It would therefore be desirable to have the cooling apparatus of the cold plate type for rack mounted electronic modules compensate for the resulting varying gap between the lower surfaces of the modules and the cold plate.